Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (37 page)

“Fuck it,” Vanessa muttered, crouching to peer into his eyes, checking pupil dilation, reaction. “You’re in pre-immersion hypnosis, somehow they cracked these fucking barriers, it shouldn’t be possible.”

There was shooting out in the lobby now, agents were busting in, removing obstacles the easy way. Shouting nearby, and running footsteps. They’d try to retrieve the data, transmit to the network before the CSA arrived.

“We have to get out of here!” Vanessa snapped. “Move, move!” She grabbed him and tried to haul him to the second entry doorways to this room, but Phillippe was dazed and stumbling. Movement in the first doorway; Vanessa threw him flat and shot through the door at the first man, who barely ducked away in time. She crouched low as return fire came past the doorframe, emptying her second magazine as she slithered sideways toward her husband, shoving him towards the second doors again as bullets cracked and fizzed about.

She reloaded as Phillippe made a dash for the doors, got one open, which she sprang through and past him to clear the hallway beyond. Someone peered around a corner ahead, and she blasted the walls to dissuade him. Bracing against the doors on the opposite hallway wall gave her a better angle, but then one of those doors shoved abruptly open, sending her sprawling. Phillippe leaped at the new arrival, who knocked him aside, only to be hit by Vanessa in an eye blurring co-mingle of interlocking limbs, bodies twisting for leverage as they spun about, and then something abruptly broke, with a horrid snap louder than a branch breaking.

Bodies fell to the ground, Vanessa shoving the oddly right-angled torso off her and coming up shooting to keep the man at the hallway corner back.

“Yeah that’s right, you piece of shit!” she yelled at him. “Come and get some!”

Someone shot him from further up the adjoining hallway, and he stumbled into Vanessa’s field of fire. Vanessa took his legs, he fell, screaming, and writhed.

“Commander Rice!” she yelled at the footsteps of approaching agents coming up the adjoining hall. “Me and one friendly, but this hallway is not secure!”

They peered at her, fast and professional in suits with handguns, then rushed on to secure the rest of the floor. No one was trusting tacnet; everything had to be checked visually.

Phillippe was staring at her, slumped against the hallway wall. Vanessa realised the moisture on her cheek was blood, not hers.

“Are you okay?” she asked him, suddenly worried that his pale expression might betray some injury.

“Fine,” he said hoarsely. “I’m fine.” His eyes strayed to the big man she’d nearly broken in half, clinging to his back like a jockey on a horse. The man was still alive, trying to breathe through a shattered diaphragm. The look on his face as he died was beyond horrifying. “Oh, God. Should we help him?”

“Sure,” said Vanessa, and shot him.

She didn’t need to. The guy had maybe thirty seconds left, if that. She wasn’t sure why she did it, so cold and brutal. More CSA agents rushed past, checking their hallway, moving on to the next. Their shouts and calls filled the air as they cleared one space after another with reassuring speed.

Phillippe stared at the body, eyes filling with tears. He looked at her, and reached for her hand.

“Vanessa, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I put you in danger. I was stupid, I thought it was a game. Oh, God, I’m sorry, I nearly got you killed. Look what you had to do to save me.”

That was what bothered him, not the blood, not the dead man. The fact that he’d been trapped in enemy hands, and she’d had to charge through them to get to him.

Now she was tearing up. “I’d do it again. I love you.”

“You won’t have to,” he told her, with firm earnest. “No more silly hero stuff from me. I’m out. You’re the professional, I’ll do whatever you say.”

Vanessa took a deep breath. Phillippe might come to regret that decision too, she thought.

SWAT One’s flyer picked Vanessa up from the Ahimsa Hotel rooftop. It was a relief to get away from the place, the swarming agents, police and media, the many people requesting directions and information she was neither prepared nor willing to give.

“Sitrep,” she said whilst stripping to her underclothes before her team of assembled grunts. Visuals came in on her headset visor: displays of Tanusha, the location of all SWAT units, some known League targets, some others located only by guesswork.

“
Everyone’s up,
” came Captain Arvid Singh’s voice. “
Twelve teams, three more on standby. We’ve got two hundred and forty-six confirmed League entities we want detained, forty of them are possible hostiles. The cops are taking the lead and our ground guys are going after the more significant ones. And we’re closing down the League Embassy, all power and communications. SWAT Three and Nine are taking up perimeter positions now.
”

So that was two of her teams pinned down at the Embassy, Vanessa noted as she stepped into her armour suit in its rack, and began buttoning up. The others were all airborne save for the three standbys, which usually meant they were having trouble recalling troops on leave, and hadn’t gotten off the ground yet.

“Copy Arvid, give me two minutes to soak this up, then I’ll take command.”

“
Copy Ricey, two minutes then you have command.
” It was her procedure. Stupid to have a commander issuing orders straight from the first second when she hadn’t had time to absorb the scale of this yet. If anything happened in the next two minutes, Arvid would make the call.

An important message light was flashing, and she opened it. “
Why did they shoot at you?
” came Director Chandrasekar’s voice. “
A high risk intel operation is one thing, but why defend it with force?
” Given the consequences for Federation-League relations, he meant.

“Buying time, I’d guess,” said Vanessa, as the armour’s leg seals hissed and clicked into place. “Assimilating that kind of data takes a little while. They had to package and encrypt it before they could shoot it off to where ever it went. So whatever it was, they valued it a lot.”

“
The clear pattern is anyone who knew anything about our activities on New Torah, even those peripherally connected.
”

Something occurred to Vanessa. “Shit, so they got Justice Rosa.”

“
We’re pretty sure. We’re reviewing him now, but it looks like he was in their web before he went to you. And had no idea what had happened to him
,
he thought he’d just been at a party, no memory at all.
”

“So they’ll know everything he knows about Sandy and New Torah.”

“
We’re not certain how good their technology’s recall is. We’ll have to study it now we’ve captured some, though they destroyed a lot before we could grab it. They might not have that much, and Justice didn’t know very much anyway.
”

“He knew that Sandy was ‘going away’ for a while, so they couldn’t continue their interviews. He’s not dumb, he knows what that means.” She wriggled into the torso harness, felt it tighten around her with a familiar, gripping embrace. “So we’re taking their Callayan access away from them?”

“
No choice; this is very nearly an act of war. We can’t set foot on the embassy grounds, but we can sure as hell cut it off. All of their personnel or League-associated people we’re collecting now. At least a few of them might try and escape, maybe shoot back. I’m not taking any chances.
” Chandi spoke quickly off-mike—he’d be doing about five things at once at the moment, and briefing his SWAT Commander was just one of them. “
Intel tells me you took out a GI.
”

“Yeah. She must have been one of the ones making that VR matrix work. Sandy’s only just discovered how good she is at that. It figures that the League would have known about it for a while longer.”

“
Intel found two more GIs at the hotel, both non-combat designations. They tell me the one you shot was very much a combat designation. A 39.
”

Vanessa blinked. She really shouldn’t be alive. Thirty nine was Rhian’s designation, and Rhian was deadly. Not as deadly as Sandy, but that was an unfair measure. “It’s the way they walk,” she explained. “Combat pre-tension. Their muscles tense up as combat reflex kicks in, I’ve seen it in Sandy and others. It changes their stride just a little, I got the jump on her.”

“
Yeah, well ‘getting the jump’ on a GI of that designation should only give you point zero five of a second head start, which for most people will not be enough. Given you’re still here and she’s not, I think you did a bit more than just ‘get the jump’ on her. I think you may have just made human augmentation history.
”

He disconnected. Crap, thought Vanessa. That made her sound like a lab rat. Which was always going to happen, she supposed further, as soon as she’d made the decision to get the latest upgrades done. And it sure beat being dead.

She got her arms in, then mated the two armour halves together with a hard seal, and suddenly the deadweight suit sprang to life. Power cells hummed and artificial muscles flexed and sprung. She left the helmet on its hook at the back of her collar, and strode up the narrow aisle between armoured soldiers to her command chair at the front.

There she took command from Arvid, and set the various airbourne units into wide holding patterns over various parts of the city, heavily armed backup for ongoing operations on the ground. Calls came in quickly enough. Cops chased one running suspect into a tall building and given that the target was suspected spec-ops and high value, asked for support. Vanessa put SWAT Eleven down on the building rooftop to trap him.

Some more high-risk targets made rendezvous in a park. She sent in one of the combat flyers to get a heavy weapons lock on them. They surrendered to local police, with expressions that suggested they thought such tactics were a little unfair. Barely an hour into the operation, three quarters of all targets were accounted for. Vanessa thought back to seven years ago, when Sandy had first arrived on Callay and all this mess had started, and tried to imagine any security task this complicated being done in so little time with no casualties so far. It was unimaginable.

The League Ambassador tried to go on local news nets to protest this action by the heavy handed CSA and FSA, but the feed mysteriously cut out before he could get to the good bit where he’d start threatening League-Federation relations with “instability.” News nets protested to Chandrasekar directly, asking if the CSA had cut the League Ambassador off, and if so, what had happened to free speech? Chandrasekar issued a statement through a spokesperson replying that the League Embassy was implicated in large scale security violation in Ahimsa Hotel, which had been broken up by CSA Agents with a number of casualties (which the media already knew), and that CSA policy was to disallow any figures actively involved in the violation of Callayan security from making public statements that would do no more than further their cause.

Vanessa thought it was quite well played, and listened a little to the media back and forth as they circled into the Tanushan evening. They monitored the apprehension of the remaining League citizens and subjects of interest across the city. Some media commentators wondered if this meant the war was back on. More sensible folks said that was stupid, and wondered what the hell the League had been doing at the Ahimsa Hotel that had led to a shootout. Thankfully, they had little evident clue of the answer.

In the early evening they landed at a public flyer port atop a mid-level tower for refueling. She let her troops out to stretch their legs—it got deadly boring after a while, sitting in the rear in full armour, watching visor displays and not actually doing anything. Such was the lot of a SWAT grunt. Sometimes you got to go in, and sometimes you didn’t.

Rhian called. “
They’re after Sandy, aren’t they? They’re trying to find out where she is.
”

Vanessa stood on the landing platform beside the flyer’s rear ramp, as engines whined and refueling pumps hummed. Before her, the lights of Tanusha glowed in their millions against the gathering dark, as the flyer’s landing lights strobed the pad orange. “Oh, I think they know where she is. They want to know what she’s doing, and probably what Mustafa’s doing to help her.”

“
I notice none of our targets are ISO.
”

“Yeah. That ought to make relations between League government and ISO even worse.”

“
Vanessa, what if the League intervene in New Torah themselves? I mean, not to stop the New Torah administration, just to stop the ISO and Sandy?
”

Vanessa gazed across the cityscape horizon. Techs manning the fuel pumps gesticulated to each other above the noise. “Let’s find out what they know first. Then we’ll start worrying.”

“
What if they know a lot?
” Rhian sounded worried already. Rhian was usually so optimistic, it wasn’t like her. “
I mean, if Sandy’s about to get trapped out there . . . what do we do?
”

“I don’t know, Rhi.” Vanessa forced herself to calm. “Like I said, let’s wait and find out what we can find out first, okay?”

She knew damn well what she’d do. But doing so was going to make a real mess.

“
Okay,
” Rhian said quietly. As far as she’d come as a person, Rhian would never be a commander. In some things, she’d always need to be told what to do. Thankfully, her judgment in who she’d listen to was pretty good. “
I heard you got a high-designation GI just now.
”

“Yeah. Your designation, actually.”

“
Now yours, too,
” said Rhian, with a faint smile in her voice, and disconnected. And left Vanessa, slightly stunned, to ponder that.